What Trump should be making great again are the lives of Americans

US President Donald Trump’s trade wars are the result of a reckoning with the accumulated contradictions arising from globalisation. Instead of addressing the polarisation in the United States that propelled him to power, Trump blames “the other”. But his tariffs will only exacerbate US structural inequality.

Globalisation created greater equality by bringing prosperity to the developing world, notably in the rise of East Asia. China has lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than any other nation. Before Trump unleashed his tariffs on the world, China’s overseas investments and infrastructure development were poised to benefit the Global South, from Southeast Asia to Africa.

With global convergence came domestic divergence. While the US has grown more prosperous with globalisation, the benefits have mostly accrued to the elite. Middle-class wages have been stagnant for decades and many blue-collar jobs have vanished, though this is also increasingly the result of automation.

While countries from Singapore to the Nordic nations mitigate the relentless forces of globalisation with skill upgrades and income redistribution, the US has not. Do American workers have the skills and discipline to undertake mass manufacturing jobs if they returned and would they even want to?